Here are my observations

WW, yeah, it was a flawed experiment, like many. I seriously was curious how many different opinions I'd get. And, was happy with those tendered. I feel that there's a little bit of prescriptivist in all of us: you, me, and others. Likewise there's a touch of the descriptivist in most of us, too.

Where did you get that sentence, by the way?

I wrote it the other day in a blog entry. I added the first comma and corrected the misspelled Ithaca at the time of starting the thread. The book is a rather fun rant by an old-fashioned (i.e., per-Chomskyan) linguist about the foolishness of prescriptivism in general. I'd already read it in its second and non-vanity-press-published edition, and had obtained this first edition to see how much—if anything—had been changed.

I was mainly interested in the commas delimiting the Jr. in Professor Hall's name, but the colon/em dash controversy started up and I've had fun looking through various normative books in my library as a result.

Thanks, everybody.